Month: October 2015

Having recently moved home, I’m incredibly excited to finally be able to nail things to the wall. You can’t usually do that in rented accommodation in the UK, so when I was presented with several bare walls to decorate, I couldn’t wait to get started!

And the first thing on my list? A gallery wall.

If you’re not familiar with the term, a gallery wall is essentially a wall on which there are lots of pictures. You choose different frames of different sizes, and then artfully arrange them until they look pretty.

Depending on your taste and ability to cope with disarray, you can use frames and colours of all sorts of shapes and sizes. Personally, I stuck with black frames. And used a ruler and measuring tape to (unsuccessfully) make the whole thing as symmetrically haphazard as possible. What can I say? I enjoy uniformity.

Anyway, I titled this post ‘The No.1 Tip for Putting Together a Gallery Wall’. So let’s get to the point. That tip is: use newspaper.

You don’t want to be making holes in your nice wall, and then deciding you don’t like how you’ve arranged your gallery. That’s why you should cut out the shapes of each of your frames in newspaper before you get started.

Next, use masking tape or washi tape to stick your newspaper shapes to the wall. Beware blu tack by the way – it has a habit of leaving damp little marks!

Once you’ve stuck your paper rectangles somewhere that looks vaguely acceptable, move them around until you’re happy with the design. Then remove them one by one and replace them with your real frames. Job done!

Things I learned whilst making a gallery wall:

I’m really rubbish at nailing things to the wall. Hopefully you’ll be better at it than me.

I was also rubbish at working out where the picture hook should go to create exactly the right space between the ‘&’ picture and the chimpanzee picture. So if anyone has any tips on how to get that right, please share them! I (clearly) still haven’t mastered it.

Finally, if you want to know where I got my inspiration and a few of the prints, they’re on my ‘Art bits’ Pinterest board, which you can find here.

Way back in 2013 I got very excited about purchasing my first beauty advent calendar. Benefit and Body Shop were all sold out, and though I lusted over the Selfridges offering, there was no way I could afford it. So You Beauty it was.

2013’s offering

At £59.95 (plus P&P) it’s a fairly standard price for the beauty advent calendars out there. But does that make it justifiable?

Well, this year’s offering has just been released. And, as is traditional, I’ve had a little nosey at the products included!

The You Beauty Advent Calendar 2015. Photo borrowed from the website. It’s not mine yo.

From Burts Bees to Benefit, Molton Brown to Philip Kingsley, and Rituals to Rodial, the brands included are pretty lustworthy, which is a good start.

There’s also a good range of product types, including tweezers, moisturisers, home fragrance sticks, bath salts, hair products, makeup, and even a bee venom eye cream (fancy!).

The total value of the haul is £330. So when you buy the calendar, that’s a huge saving of £270.

Again, borrowed from the You Beauty Website.

Still, the question for me is how many of the products I’d realistically buy for myself. The honest answer is four or five. And would their full size versions add up to £60? I’m not sure.

For that reason, I’ll be giving it a miss this year.

HOWEVER. If you’re a beauty blogger and have never bought a beauty advent calendar before, I’d definitely recommend it! Calendars like this give you great material for posts and reviews all the way up to Christmas, and they’re also a brilliant way to get an idea of what’s out there on the beauty scene – without spending all your money in Space NK.

And of course – above all else – opening a door on your advent calendar is a great way to brighten up those dark December mornings. Especially when there’s an exciting beauty product behind it.

My one recommendation? If you want to get it, make sure you’re quick. They don’t sell out as fast as the Benefit ones, but oh my crikey do they fly off the shelves…